KYIV, Ukraine — Russian officials said Ukraine attacked Moscow before dawn Tuesday with its largest long-range drone bombardment of the war, as both sides stepped up attacks before talks intended to end three years of fighting.

Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said the attack was the largest against the city since the start of the war more than three years ago. At least two people were killed and 18 others were injured, Russian authorities said, and the city’s four international airports, serving a metropolitan area of 21 million, were forced to temporarily suspend operations.

The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed to have shot down at least 91 drones in the region around Moscow and more than 240 drones directed at other targets across the country. The Ukrainian military did not have any immediate comment on the strikes.

President Vladimir Putin was briefed on the attack, according to Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesperson. Peskov said Russian air defenses were doing “a great job” but told reporters that the authorities “must remain on guard” because attacks would likely continue.

Ukraine, United States Delegations Scheduled to Meet

The predawn strikes — just hours before high-level delegations from Ukraine and the United States were scheduled to meet in Saudi Arabia to discuss a possible path toward ending the war — appeared intended to serve as a reminder that despite suffering attacks and enduring huge losses, Ukraine can still hit back at Russia.

Ukraine has proposed an immediate truce in the air, saying it would immediately stop long-range strikes into Russia if Moscow agreed to an equivalent halt.

That plan, supported by European nations, including France, is envisioned as a first step in building trust before talks about the overall conflict, in which over a million Ukrainian and Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded.

Ukrainian officials are expected to raise it again when they meet with U.S. officials in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In addition to a partial truce in the air, Ukraine was also expected to press the case for a halt to strikes on the Black Sea to gauge whether Moscow was willing to take any steps to end the fighting.

When asked Tuesday whether Moscow would agree to such a plan, Peskov said it was “impossible to talk about positions now” and that Russia expected the U.S. side to inform Moscow about the results of talks with Ukraine.

Ukraine Plans to Produce 30,000 Long-Range Strike Drones, 3,000 Missiles

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that Ukraine plans to produce 30,000 long-range strike drones and 3,000 long-range missiles this year, building its domestic arms-making abilities even as U.S. military assistance remains suspended.

Russia has maintained its relentless bombardment of Ukrainian civilian and military institutions over the course of the war. Nearly every night in recent weeks, Russia has launched over 100 drones at targets across Ukraine, including at Kyiv, the capital.

The assaults — which frequently include a combination of ballistic and cruise missiles in an effort to saturate Ukrainian air defenses — persisted overnight Monday and into Tuesday.

The Ukrainian air force said the latest attack from Russia included 126 drones and one ballistic missile.

Explosions echoed across Kyiv around midnight as air defense teams scrambled, and the Ukrainian air force said it shot down or disabled most of the drones as well as the missile.

At least one person was killed when a Russian drone struck a warehouse in Kharkiv and at least 17 others were injured in other attacks across the country, Ukrainian authorities said. Drones hit the port city of Odesa in southern Ukraine, with local authorities reporting fires in multiple locations.

Since President Donald Trump spoke by telephone with Putin on Feb. 12 — the first official contact between the heads of state for the United States and Russia in years — more than 100 civilians have been killed in Russian strikes, according to data compiled by The New York Times based on reports from Ukrainian authorities.

The intensifying strikes have been accompanied by shifting dynamics on the front lines, with Russian forces, assisted by thousands of North Korean soldiers, retaking a large part of the territory in Russia’s Kursk region that had been occupied by Ukrainian forces. In a statement Tuesday, the Russian Defense Ministry said its forces had retaken more than 35 square miles of land in the Kursk region. That claim could not be independently verified.

Ukraine Hoped to Control a Negotiation Leveraging Portion of Land

Ukraine had hoped to use its control of that portion of land as leverage in any negotiations to end the war, but the recent developments may have changed that calculus, because the cost of holding the territory could outweigh any diplomatic gain.

With the Ukrainian salient in Kursk now collapsed to an area around Sudzha, about 6 miles across the border, and its supply lines under constant attack, their hold on the area is increasingly precarious.

The top Ukrainian military commander, Oleksandr Syrsky, said Monday night that Ukraine was dispatching reinforcements. He rejected Russian claims that a large contingent of Ukrainian soldiers were at risk of encirclement.

“A decision was made to reinforce our group with the necessary forces and resources, including electronic warfare and drones,” he said. “Currently, there is no threat of encirclement of our units in the Kursk region.”

At the same time, there are signs that the Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine has stalled. Russian forces have not advanced in over a week and Ukrainian forces have engaged in limited counterattacks to regain small patches of land, according to Ukrainian soldiers and military analysts who use combat footage to track the daily movements along the front.

In Moscow, railway tracks near the Domodedovo airport south of Moscow were damaged. At least 20 cars were burned at a parking lot in the nearby town of Domodedovo, according to Andrei Vorobyev, the region’s governor, who issued a statement. A 38-year-old security guard died on site because of the attack, Vorobyev said.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Marc Santora and Ivan Nechepurenko
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